The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP) of the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania conducts research on the role policy institutes play in governments and civil societies around the world. The annual Global Go To Think Tank Index ranks the world’s leading think tanks in a variety of categories.
Other Think Tank Resources
Locating Books │ General Article Databases │ Subject Databases │ Scholarly Databases │Core Academic Journals
The Penn Libraries, including the social science collections in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, provide a wide range of print and electronic books for all areas of politics and international relations.
Two major commercial database vendors—EBSCO and ProQuest—are widely used to provide e-books, political science journals, and peer-reviewed articles. Universities will usually provide access to databases from one or both vendors. Important things to know about EBSCO and ProQuest.
The following list provides the top subject-specific research databases for locating political science and public policy journals and articles.
The following databases offer access to scholarly and peer-reviewed academic journals across most academic disciplines. Also listed are open access databases providing the latest working papers. Working papers are scholarly articles in the process of being written for submission to scholarly journals. Because working papers are not yet peer-reviewed, their quality can range widely. However, they can still provide you with a wealth of scholarly information on a topic, along with references that can lead you to other useful articles.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data from approximately 12,000 journals from publishers in over 80 countries. You can use JCR to find the best journals published within specific research areas.
The following journals are listed in the JCR as the ten most cited, best-quality journals in the political science category. If you would like to review the JCR list of the top-cited political science journals in the last year, go to Journal Citation Reports and choose Categories > Social Sciences, General > Political Science.